“Armaments for our new opposition,” Kumar says. “I would like to see those growths. We might understand what sort of creatures they’re hoping to use to extinguish us.”
“The searchers aren’t being much help,” DJ says. “All we saw are dead—dozens of them. But remember that transport we used around the screw garden?” He seems unwilling to continue until we admit we remember that much.
“Well,” he says, weirdly satisfied, as if he’s sounding out our sanity, “there’s something like that along the tree, maybe half a dozen tracks moving in and around the branches, carrying shit forward and back—fruit, half-formed weapons, ships.”
“Some of those ships look like ones we’ve used,” Joe says. “Others are new and different. And as for weapons… I can’t understand any of them.”
“You won’t be using them,” Kumar observes.
“Anyway, we hitched a ride on one of those railcars going aft,” Joe says. “About three klicks from here, past where the squid ponds used to be, the rest of the Antags have got four ships in an outboard hangar. They seem to think they’re enough to get all of them down to the surface. They want the hell off this hulk.”
“Can’t blame them, if they’re home,” Ishida says.
“Have you seen the surface?” I ask.
DJ says, “Sort of, in the big star dish. There aren’t any squids there now, either. Whole ship seems empty.”
“Could they all be dead?” Ishida asks.
“They could have withdrawn. No way of knowing.”
“Maybe they’re going to be shipped home as well,” Borden says. “Evacuating.”
“Optimistic appraisal, at best.” Kumar says.
“Is Ulyanova ours or the ship’s?” Joe asks. “I really need to know.”
“She’s putting everything she’s got into staying human, and Vera is helping where she can,” I say. “But I’m thinking we gave her a fucking impossible task.”
Litvinov curses under his breath and looks ghostly pale. He’s contemplating the loss of almost every soldier he trained and fought with, one way or another. And we’re no consolation. After all, we might have helped Sudbury become our worst enemy.
“Focus on what we need to know!” Borden insists.
“We’re orbiting a big dark planet,” Joe says. “That much we can confirm.”
“But how can we be sure we’re actually there?” Borden asks.
“The Antags should know, right?” Jacobi asks.
“Sun-Planet!” DJ says in wonder. “Planet X.”
“There are a lot of Planet X’s out around the Kuiper belt,” I say. “Big and small. Maybe warm, maybe cold—in the hundreds. I don’t know how many are as large as Bird Girl’s world, or how many were tinkered with by the bugs, but they and the Gurus have been playing with extrasolar planets for a long, long time.”
“And that Christmas ornament, too,” DJ says. “Moving shit around.”
Joe shakes his head. “I’m not even going to think about that.”
Borden says, “Job one, we have to put together something like weapons, go back in force, and kill the rest of the cage fighters. And we have to make sure the Antags are happy to leave without killing us—or Ulyanova.”
“Might be walking into a hornet’s nest,” Jacobi says.
DJ observes that Sudbury never did have leadership skills. “He could barely understand orders.”
“Maybe so, but since then he’s gone through a whole new level of fight club,” I say.
“Doesn’t matter,” Joe says. He’s trying to pare the mission down to something we can all understand. Borden seems to approve. “I assume what Ulyanova told you is that the mice are loose in the cheese shop and the cats don’t fucking care. Happy to watch us all fight it out.”
Long pause. I tongue the gaps where my teeth used to be. Wonder if they’re floating around here somewhere…
Without warning, the ribbons begin to glow, then to alternate between lighting the darkness and giving us a look outside. Instinctively, we rotate and crane to get a full view of where we are—above and below.
Above is another terrific view of stars, including the ever-glorious Milky Way. Again, parallax unchanged. Below—
A great suggestive curve of shadow, dark brown and pewter, wreathed like a Christmas tree with flickering aurorae strung between hovering, glowing spheres. Too big to see all at once, the likely equator is divided by a thick belt of what could be ice, green or blue under the spheres, pale gray beneath the aurora.
Out here, tens of thousands of millions of klicks from the sun, there’s no sunlight, just the illumination from those rippling, ever-refreshing aurorae, moving like ocean breakers above the surface, defining segments of bright and dark—a twilight-only version of night and day.
As described.
Sun-Planet.
“It’s split in half,” Jacobi says.
DJ looks caught up in it all, smug at the confirmation. His mind is absorbing the new details. As is mine. It’s beautiful and strange down there. “Divided planet,” he says. “Antags grew up in the northern hemisphere, searchers in the southern. Separated by thousands of klicks of ice! Brilliant. Bugs had a hand in this, right? Two species separated until they were ready.”
“Bad news for the searchers,” I say. “At first.”
“Yeah… But then they learned how to get along.” His voice trails off at these strange, impersonal memories of Antag history, exploitation. They behaved so much like humans.
The mention of bugs provokes a weird sensation inside me of yet again being examined by an outside interest—curious in a fixed way, insistent but gentle. Something very old and disturbingly familiar is rummaging through my head and picking out words, maybe trying to learn my language—but then it comes upon fragments of my interactions with the archives on Mars and on Titan. Bug memories. I contain history I never lived, history I couldn’t possibly know, along with the serial numbers, the identifying marks left by those archives.
DJ isn’t looking smug now. “It’s back!” he says.
“What?” Ishida asks.
“There’s an archive nearby,” I say.
“It’s fucking huge,” DJ says. “Bigger than anything we’ve found so far.”
I confirm he’s correct.
The others absorb this with their own weary familiarity. We’ve been jerked around by history and by our ugly ancestors too many times to take great cheer at this news, but at least it gets us moving. At least it could promise more interesting developments.
“Let’s go,” Joe says.
Bilyk suddenly doesn’t look good. His arms and legs hang limp, his skin is pale, and his eyes have rolled back. Ishida intervenes and Litvinov doesn’t object. She carefully rotates him to show us the spreading bruise along his neck and the back of his head. Our attackers must have sapped him, cracking his spine.
“Is he alive?” Ishikawa asks.
“Barely,” Ishida says.
He didn’t complain at first. Now he can’t.
Litvinov looks at all of us as if this is the last straw and escorts the efreitor back to their nest. DJ tries to go with Bilyk, but Litvinov blocks him. “He must heal himself,” Litvinov murmurs. “He is strong.”
“And what if the fighters return?”
“I am staying here,” Litvinov says. “I am old and too slow to matter back there. We will watch and try to protect curtain, Bilyk—last of my soldiers. I ask Kumar to stay with us.”
Kumar agrees with a nod, then looks at the rest of us, as if he will soon be a dead man.
“We don’t have real weapons,” Borden says.
DJ and Tak brandish their canes, rather pitifully—though the tips are sharp, if they’re used correctly.